You have heard the tune. Great minds, we are told, no longer just publish top-tier research and teach, because the traditional model of scholarship has become too narrow and insular. Great minds become proselytizers of big ideas.

They captivate the public as influential research bloggers and attract new stakeholders like donors and media journalists through attractive digital translations of their scholarship. They manage thriving Twitter presences, and design popular MOOCs (massive open online courses).

All of this happens because universities and professors experience the fundamental disruption brought about by the fourth industrial revolution: Digital transformation.

According to “Digital Transformation in Higher Education,” a 2017 study by global education provider Navitas, 78 per cent of all participating universities have begun to digitize some elements of their course delivery and are also creating new digital models.

Five years ago, I began asking myself what the digital transformation could mean for me as a professor at the Schulich School of Business at York University.

Over time, I “digitized” my research agenda, created a research blog with 250,000 monthly readers, designed an MBA course around my research on consumer sociology, and founded a thriving and well-funded research institute called the Big Design Lab.

In this article, I would like to reflect on what I’ve learned.

Digital professors as thought leaders

Most discussions about the digital transformation in higher education take a decidedly pro-market view. As the old models of intellectual contribution are being disrupted, their authors argue, professors must proactively use social media technology to become powerful thought leaders.

It is easy to see how this makes perfect sense. Digital professors can do much more for their universities because they manage bigger platforms and can attract more students, practitioners, donors and journalists to their institutions.

Fully fledged digital professors are not only good researchers and teachers. They are also fundraisers, student recruiters, career consultants and social media influencers — all in one body.

Digital communication opportunities offer young scholars the possibility of distributing knowledge to vast audiences, so long as they do not relinquish the critical edge of their work.(Shutterstock))

My own experience over the years, however, leads me to make the opposite case: Digital transformation understood in this manner is symptomatic of a problematic neoliberal push in our universities — to use research ideas to uncritically legitimize and extend moneyed interests.

I strongly encourage young professors to do whatever they can to avoid precisely that.

Public intellectuals, Session writes, traffic in complexity and criticism. Thought leaders burst with the evangelist’s desire to “change the world.” Yet whereas in Drezner’s view these two types of thinker balance each other out, Sessions argues, and I agree, that our current university landscape largely privileges the latter.

By shifting responsibilities for social and economic problems away from corporations and government institutions and towards individual consumers, these and other narratives reinforce the social and economic status quo.

Unsurprisingly, there is a huge marketplace of ideas, conferences and think tanks for status-quo reinforcing research — whether it concerns chronic illness, poverty, global warming or financial wellbeing.

For this reason, the challenge in becoming a digital professor is not finding an audience of interested readers. The real challenge is withstanding the temptation of letting neoliberal agendas compromise your scholarship’s rigour, complexity and criticism. The real challenge, in other words, is NOT becoming a thought leader.

The author gives a talk at TEDx YorkU.Author provided (No reuse)

However, Sessions also takes his valuable critique too far. It is easy to see how the thought leader model is flawed, especially in business schools. But when all thought leader techniques — like doing a research talk in a TED format, creating a blog that speaks to business practitioners or adopting a think tank structure for a research lab — are automatically framed as surrenders to corporate influence, we also give young professors a false choice between being critical and being digital.

One of the most unexpected things that I have learned by doing many of these things — often under the critical gaze of my outreach-skeptical baby boomer colleagues — is how much digitally enhanced critical research can influence the corporate agenda, and how much these digitally enhanced dialogues can, in turn, inform the production of critical research.

A space for skepticism and curiosity

Surveying the digital landscape, it is clear that the corporate elites are themselves not a monolithic bloc anymore. Many executives, policy makers and entrepreneurs are increasingly tired of cheerleaders for the next big idea who simply echo what elites already believe in.

The much-maligned “ideas industry” has also helped me discover the value of writing research summaries in critical outlets such as the The Baffler, the Transnational Institute or, in the present case, The Conversation Canada.

In today’s world, buzzwords such as “digital transformation” can become anchors for exposing audiences to critical thought.

Many practitioners that I work with are open to these research findings — findings that are often critical of their activities. Those who are not are not my audience. Because my job as a professor, digital or not, is never to merely perpetuate the status quo but to give voice to less articulated alternatives.

Mainstream discussions of digital transformation fail to address how technology reshapes (and also constrains) the political economy of ideas. Critical treatments of thought leadership, on the other hand, reinforce luddite tendencies.

I encourage young professors to meet the digital transformation with both skepticism and curiosity. The definition of the digital professor that I propose is neither the thought leader who only serves the one per cent. Nor is it the public intellectual who smells hegemonic betrayal behind every TED talk or think tank initiative.

The real value of digital technologies in higher education is that they give us new avenues for producing and promoting scholarship that is critical of the status quo.

A recent report from RBC Royal Bank predicts increasing workplace demand for foundational skills such as critical thinking, coordination, social perceptiveness, active listening and complex problem solving. Here graduands attend spring convocation at the University of British Columbia in 2015.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck